Simplify to resist: strengthening cybersecurity while controlling costs
OP-ED · 26 MAY 2026
By Jérôme Beaufils, CEO of SASETY · Lire en français
The return of uncertainty
Companies operate in a particularly unstable economic climate. Multiplying geopolitical tensions, especially in the Middle East, are having very concrete effects on the global economy. Rising oil prices, market volatility, higher raw material costs, strained supply chains: these phenomena directly affect companies, whatever their sector.
For many executives, the challenge is now twofold. They must keep investing to stay competitive and protect the business, while controlling costs more strictly.
This pressure naturally weighs on IT departments, which must demonstrate their ability to contribute to the company's resilience.
Constant pressure
In this context, IT and cybersecurity are entering a new phase of maturity. For a long time, companies mainly sought to add technologies to address each new risk or each new need.
Today, executive management asks a much more pragmatic question: how can the company's resilience be strengthened while keeping complexity and costs under control?
Because in the meantime, cyber threats keep growing.
Attacks have become constant. Ransomware still targets French companies, sometimes with considerable impact.
Phishing campaigns are becoming more sophisticated. Cloud environments and AI-related usage open up new exposure surfaces.
And in a tense geopolitical context, many organisations also expect a rise in opportunistic or state-sponsored attacks.
The latest figures published by ANSSI (the French national cybersecurity agency) show that pressure remains extremely high. In 2025, the agency recorded nearly 3,600 cyber incidents and reported that attacks involving data exfiltration rose by more than 50%.
This trend reflects a simple reality: attackers now seek to monetise the data itself, sometimes without even encrypting information systems.
Cybersecurity has therefore become a major strategic issue. The goal now is to strengthen security while simplifying IT environments.
Technology stacking
This is precisely where many organisations are reaching saturation today.
Over the years, many of them built their security by successively stacking products: firewall, VPN, web proxy, SD-WAN, cloud security, CASB, ZTNA, monitoring tools, analytics platforms, SOC… Each technology met a legitimate need. But collectively, they have often created architectures that are extremely complex to maintain and costly to operate.
The problem now goes beyond the price of licences or equipment. Above all, it concerns the operational load generated by this complexity: more consoles, integrations to maintain, technical dependencies, event correlation, managing security policies across several environments, growing demands on internal teams.
Many IT managers see it every day: a large share of their teams' time is now spent making tools work together rather than truly improving the company's security posture.
The invisible cost
Unified technology approaches are emerging precisely to address this issue.
The idea is simple: rather than adding up independent components, network and security functions can now be brought together within a single platform, with centralised administration, global visibility and simplified operations.
This approach significantly reduces costs. Companies reduce the number of products to master and maintain. They simplify architectures, reduce technical dependencies and lighten the operational load on IT teams. They also gain visibility and consistency in applying their security policies.
A unified platform
This is precisely the philosophy of Cato Networks through its converged, cloud-native SASE approach.
By bringing network and cybersecurity functions together in a single platform, Cato allows companies to profoundly simplify their architecture while strengthening their security posture.
Organisations can thus gradually replace complex, fragmented environments with a much more coherent, agile and easy-to-operate approach.
This convergence covers all the major cyber challenges companies face today.
The platform includes secure network connectivity, SD-WAN, secure Internet access, protection of remote users, traffic segmentation, Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), advanced web filtering, threat prevention, TLS inspection, CASB to control SaaS usage, as well as real-time detection and visibility across all network and application traffic.
Cato also includes advanced DLP (Data Loss Prevention) capabilities that allow companies to control the flow of sensitive data, limit exfiltration risks and apply consistent protection policies for critical information across cloud, web and SaaS usage.
The platform also addresses an issue that has become major for companies: securing the use of artificial intelligence. With the spread of generative AI tools in the workplace, including agents, organisations now seek to control usage, increase visibility over interactions with AI platforms and limit the risks of sharing sensitive data. Cato's unified approach brings these new uses into an overall governance and security policy.
Cato also provides a unified approach to running network and security operations within the same platform. This convergence greatly improves real-time visibility, speeds up investigations and simplifies day-to-day operations thanks to native event correlation, advanced analytics and much more consistent operations across network, security and operations teams.
This simplification profoundly changes the daily work of IT and cybersecurity teams. Companies reduce the number of technologies to maintain, greatly limit integrations between third-party products and gain consistency in applying security policies. Investigations become faster, visibility broader and operations much smoother.
This approach also addresses another critical issue: flexibility.
Many companies still depend on legacy infrastructure that is particularly costly, rigid and sometimes poorly suited to new cloud and SaaS usage. In a strained economic context, these architectures are increasingly hard to justify financially.
Transforming without disruption
Despite the potential gains and the often very attractive ROI of network and cybersecurity modernisation projects, many companies still proceed with caution.
Network and security transformation projects have often been associated with long migrations, heavy involvement of internal teams, significant technical dependencies and operational disruptions that are hard to anticipate.
With IT resources still heavily stretched, management now looks for approaches that deliver results quickly while limiting the project workload.
This concern is even stronger for organisations where business continuity, network performance and operational security are particularly sensitive.
This is exactly what a French industrial group supported by SASETY recently experienced. The company wanted to modernise an MPLS infrastructure that had become costly, inflexible and complex to evolve in the face of accelerating cloud usage and growing mobility and security needs.
The issue went well beyond technology. Management was looking above all for a way to reduce operating costs while improving network performance and security, with an approach that would spare internal teams and accelerate operational benefits.
Like many organisations, the client initially feared the burden of a transformation project of this size: long timelines, a heavy internal workload, risks of disrupting production sites and the complexity of migrating from the old environment to the new cloud-native architecture.
The project was then built around a highly structured deployment methodology. Around ten workshops of under two hours were held with the IT teams to address each critical topic separately: network architecture, security, remote access, segmentation, Internet policies, cloud interconnection, monitoring and service continuity.
This step-by-step approach quickly aligned business, technical and operational stakes while greatly limiting transformation risks.
Thanks to SASETY's industrial deployment capabilities and Cato Networks' converged approach, the company was able to transform its entire infrastructure in less than three months. The financial and operational gains initially planned were achieved on schedule and within budget.
Beyond the savings, the company above all gained agility, visibility and simpler operations.
This experience illustrates an important market shift: companies now look for projects that quickly deliver tangible gains, with a highly industrialised approach and a controlled workload for internal teams.
Simplicity as a strategic lever
Unified platforms combined with specialist support allow companies to profoundly simplify their network and cybersecurity architectures while strengthening their security posture.
This approach brings immediate benefits: lower costs, better visibility, simpler operations, faster deployments and less pressure on IT teams.
By bringing network and security together within a single platform operated in an industrialised way, companies gain agility, operational control and the ability to transform.
Simplification thus becomes a genuine lever for resilience.
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